Art Young's short guide
to teaching writing across the curriculum (WAC) provides an easy-to-use introduction
to the thinking behind WAC programs and some of the most common and effective
practices employed by instructors across the disciplines. Young's aim is to
make WAC seem straight-forward, sensible and useful. For the most part the
introduction of writing into courses across the disciplines is sensible and
very useful, but it is not always as straight-forward as Young (and other
proponents) sometimes make it out to be. Young does acknowledge that integrating
writing into a course is a complicated task that obliges an instructor to
think about his or her teaching goals and how writing might help in reaching
them. However, his introduction to thinking about WAC tends to over-simplify
his subject by relying too much on thinking about writing in terms of two
categories. It might seem unfair to criticize the author of a introductory
booklet for over-simplifying (since, after all, you have to start somewhere),
but Young's over-simplification misses a chance to give instructors intellectual
tools which would be more useful to them in thinking about writing and their
teaching than the breakdown he offers. But, to be fair, I will start by addressing
the strengths of Young's gentle lead-in to writing in the disciplines.

A Useful Introduction
One of the good things about Young's introduction to WAC is that it begins
with a conversation between faculty members. He starts with a conversation
between a biology professor and himself about a particular student's writing
and, in doing so, is able to address the misunderstandings and misconceptions
that can arise between WAC proponents (such as writing coordinators or writing
fellows) and faculty members in disciplines where writing instruction is not
a big part of the curriculum (Young mentions his experiences with students
and faculty in the hard sciences and engineering).

Young's description of
his interaction with a biologist at his college will sound familiar to anyone
who has been involved in a enough discussions about writing in college. The
biologist was unhappy with the writing ability of an senior in his class and
contacted Young, who had been the student's instructor for freshman composition,
to discuss the problem. Young shows how discussions like this can be a dead
end in some ways. For one thing, they pit writing people (usually the English
department) against everyone else, on the assumption that they are the only
people who can or should do writing.

Young uses this particular
student and conversation to make one of the standard rationales for teaching
writing across the curriculum: that people in all the disciplines are responsible
for writing (otherwise no one is). Or to put it another way, if writing only
gets done in English classes then the students get the impression that paying
attention to writing is a specialized activity (like recognizing iambic pentameter)
that only matters in English classes and not an essential activity in learning,
which is how practically all college instructors would see writing. Young
gets to this point without straying too far from his illustrative anecdote.
He says that after discussions with the biologist and the student involved,
"We came to believe that writing was integral to a professional education
in biology (and every other discipline) and not simply a generic skill easily
mastered in one or two courses and then transferred effortlessly to all disciplines¡¨
(Young 1999, 3).

Young uses the same inductive
approach as he moves on to introduce the practices of WAC: he starts with
particular assignments, examples of student writing, and faculty responses
and develops from them some general concepts and approaches to writing. It
is at this point that Young divides the kinds of writing students do into
writing-to-learn and writing-to-communicate. He begins with writing-to-learn
assignments, which, aside from the obvious, are meant to allow students to
use writing as a tool to explore course material and their ideas about it
in a context other than an exam or report. There are plenty of creative and
useful examples in this section for which Young provides the all-important
mundane details of how these assignments are given, collected, evaluated,
and made use of. The assignments include: letter writing, one-minute essays,
poems (including examples from the unlikely disciplines of accounting and
computer science), journals, collaborative notes, and more. I won't try to
go into details here. If you are interested I would recommend looking through
Young's explanations of these writing ideas.

The next sections deal
with writing-to-communicate, which consists for the most part of the traditional
essay and paper assignments. Young's emphasis here is on structuring assignments
so that they allow for actual communication from student to instructor, meaning
a paper should contain some of the students' insights and ideas and not just
report information that the instructor likely knows already (and as a result
has very little interest in reading). Young provides lists of ideas for structuring
a paper assignment into many small assignments or activities at different
stages in the writing process. Both of these sections are potentially useful
(the writing-to-learn section probably more so since it contains more novel
and creative assignment ideas), but the usefulness of the division itself
is worth considering.

Two kinds of _______ in
the world.
Dividing complex phenomena into two categories is a bit like having fast food
for dinner: it's quick and convenient, and there are times when it's the best
option, but it's better not to make a habit of it. Young divides writing into
writing-to-learn and writing-to-communicate. He asks his readers to think
about writing this way and follow along as he presents his argument for the
creative approaches to writing he presents, and for someone who is completely
new to thinking about writing this way the simplicity of the division is a
virtue. Unfortunately, Young leaves his readers with this division and the
only way to think about writing, which is limiting. This division is not an
innovation of Young's; it has in various forms become standard in WAC literature.
In Young's formulation, writing-to-learn is writer-based writing. It is done
for the writer's own purposes, to advance his or her understanding of a concept
or to help think through ideas on a topic. Writing-to-communicate is done
with the reader in mind. The writer has to keep the audience in mind when
trying to convince them of something or to communicate with them. Young makes
the appropriate caveats when introducing these categories: he notes that there
are many kinds of writing that fall into both categories and mentions that
any piece of writing lies on a continuum somewhere between the two extremes.
Nonetheless, the division is still there and his booklet is structured around
it.

So what is the problem
with this division? The first is that it is not very convincing. Writing-to-learn
is written to "please the writer" writing-to-communicate is written
to "please the reader." This makes it sound like writing-to-learn
is arhetorical, that we don't shape writing that we write for ourselves according
to established patterns and for particular purposes. We do of course. We just
do so with patterns and for purposes that are so familiar to us that we are
barely aware of them. When Young introduces writing-to-learn, he gives as
an example a short informal writing assignment. The instructor told his students
that this was an informal piece of writing, but it was still collected, and
it would have been hard for the students think of the assignment as for themselves
and not for their reader, the instructor. They certainly wrote it according
to the standards they had for writing assignments that teachers will read.
And I don't think it is easy to get them to stop writing that way--just telling
them that it won't be graded or that they should write for themselves is not
likely to do it since they often won't believe us (and often we don't really
mean what we are saying.)

Young extends this problem
by including "notes and rough drafts" in the writing-to-learn category.
This leads to the second problem with his categories: they tend to hide some
very important lessons about what we need to do when we write. We do learn
when we write rough drafts, but we don't write them for ourselves, and it
would not be helpful for us or our students to think of them that way. They
are early attempts to write something to please an audience. It is just this
complicated question of the writer's relationship to the reader (or readers)
that gets ironed over by the writing-to-learn, writing-to-communicate division.
The audience for a rough draft may be literally the same as for a final draft,
usually just the instructor, but the relationship with that audience is different
because the drafts will be read for different purposes.

An alternative to this
division is to think in terms of purpose and audience, the concepts which
underlie the writing-to-learn versus writing-to-communicate distinction. Thinking
in terms of purpose and audience could be useful to instructors who don't
see how the writing they do in their course or their discipline fits into
either of Young's categories. The important element that Young's division
introduces is that the purpose of a piece of writing determines how an instructor
should respond to it and make use of it. Every piece of writing doesn't need
to be responded to as though it were the final draft of a formal report. Ultimately,
however, getting past the writing-to-learn, writing-to-communicate division
is most helpful to the students, who I suspect will find the distinction even
less convincing than most instructors. Students have the most to gain from
thinking about the purpose and audience and the effects they have on what
they write. The ability to understand that different writing situations will
oblige them to pay different levels of attention to their tone, correctness,
wording, and so on is probably the most portable and valuable lesson in writing
that a student can get.